Battlestar Galactica Showrunner Was Terrified To Watch Episodes

As with most things in the Battlestar Galactica series, this showrunner’s woes are a bit complicated and messy. It all goes back to when the show first premiered on SyFy (then called the Sci-Fi Channel). Back then, Moore ran an official blog on the network’s website in which he would provide insight into current episodes, dish about the production process, and answer the occasional fan question.

The Battlestar Galactica showrunner released one such blog ahead of “Water,” which was only the second episode of the show after the previous miniseries. He began the blog entry by discussing “the delay between action and reaction”…in this case, what it was like to watch the television debut of an episode that he had written one year before its television premiere.

At first, he focused on how surreal it was to watch these episodes of Battlestar Galactica because his showrunner brain always had him thinking ahead and how all of his memories of the episode’s production are part of “a season now firmly planted in the past.” The blog started rather maudlin, but Moore soon discussed the positive aspects of his feelings and how the “distance from the rigors of production also afford a better vantage point for watching the show with something approaching objectivity.”

He wrote all of this ahead of Battlestar Galactica’s second episode, and it turned out that the showrunner was pleasantly surprised when watching “Water.” When he first wrote the episode, it ended up being “10-12 minutes too long,” and he felt guilty about crafting something “so bloated and large that it was killing us on the stage and would later require major surgery in the editing room to make our mandated runtime.” 

Moore discussed how this was the equivalent of cutting an entire act out of the episode and how, on previous viewings, he was “uncomfortably aware” of everything he had to cut out to make the runtime, edits that he referred to as “cheats.” Now, watching the episode again ahead of its premiere on SyFy with relatively fresh eyes, he was pleased by the quality of what he had always thought of “as one of the weaker shows in the first season.”

As described by the Battlestar Galactica showrunner, a bit of time and distance from the production of the episode meant that he “was hard-pressed to even remember most of the cuts or why they had bothered me in the first place.” He now saw the episode as a “fairly coherent piece,” which was a happy surprise. On a more somber note, though, Moore pointed out how what he was experiencing could also be a double-edged sword.

He claims that “after shedding the baggage of production,” Moore has sometimes rewatched episodes that he “always considered to be ‘classics’” and realized they had completely lost “their charm along with the experience of making it.” Knowing that he began dreading watching new episodes of Battlestar Galactica because, in the showrunner’s words, “I’m both excited and vaguely terrified at how I’ll view the rest of the season.”

While Ronald D. Moore’s comments may sound shocking to some fans, what he is describing is achingly familiar to any writer, artist, or musician: creatives are driven by their passion in the moment of creation, and nothing but time and distance can help them with objective analysis of their own work. As for Battlestar Galactica, we hope the showrunner has now had enough time to properly appreciate what a modern sci-fi classic he has created. 

Moore also proved his growth as a creator, going from the guy who started as a Star Trek writer to the showrunner who created something far better than anything modern Trek has given us. And even though he never really had a plan for his Cylons like the intro always promised, making it up as you go along is sometimes just as common with the creative process as being too hard on yourself.